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But, we need not record in memory all we see; mere incidental
concomitants need not occupy the imagination; when things vividly
present to intuition, or knowledge, happen to occur in concrete
form, it is not necessary- unless for purposes of a strictly
practical administration- to pass over that direct acquaintance,
and fasten upon the partial sense-presentation, which is already
known in the larger knowledge, that of the Universe.
I will take this point by point:
First: it is not essential that everything seen should be laid up
in the mind; for when the object is of no importance, or of no
personal concern, the sensitive faculty, stimulated by the
differences in the objects present to vision, acts without
accompaniment of the will, and is alone in entertaining the
impression. The soul does not take into its deeper recesses such
differences as do not meet any of its needs, or serve any of its
purposes. Above all, when the soul's act is directed towards
another order, it must utterly reject the memory of such things,
things over and done with now, and not even taken into knowledge
when they were present.
On the second point: circumstances, purely accidental, need not
be present to the imaging faculty, and if they do so appear they
need not be retained or even observed, and in fact the impression
of any such circumstance does not entail awareness. Thus in local
movement, if there is no particular importance to us in the fact
that we pass through first this and then that portion of air, or
that we proceed from some particular point, we do not take
notice, or even know it as we walk. Similarly, if it were of no
importance to us to accomplish any given journey, mere movement
in the air being the main concern, we would not trouble to ask at
what particular point of place we were, or what distance we had
traversed; if we have to observe only the act of movement and not
its duration, nothing to do which obliges us to think of time,
the minutes are not recorded in our minds.
And finally, it is of common knowledge that, when the
understanding is possessed of the entire act undertaken and has
no reason to foresee any departure from the normal, it will no
longer observe the detail; in a process unfailingly repeated
without variation, attention to the unvarying detail is idleness.
So it is with the stars. They pass from point to point, but they
move on their own affairs and not for the sake of traversing the
space they actually cover; the vision of the things that appear
on the way, the journey by, nothing of this is their concern:
their passing this or that is of accident not of essence, and
their intention is to greater objects: moreover each of them
journeys, unchangeably, the same unchanging way; and again, there
is no question to them of the time they spend in any given
section of the journey, even supposing time division to be
possible in the case. All this granted, nothing makes it
necessary that they should have any memory of places or times
traversed. Besides this life of the ensouled stars is one
identical thing [since they are one in the All-Soul] so that
their very spatial movement is pivoted upon identity and resolves
itself into a movement not spatial but vital, the movement of a
single living being whose act is directed to itself, a being
which to anything outside is at rest, but is in movement by dint
of the inner life it possesses, the eternal life. Or we may take
the comparison of the movement of the heavenly bodies to a choral
dance; if we think of it as a dance which comes to rest at some
given period, the entire dance, accomplished from beginning to
end, will be perfect while at each partial stage it was
imperfect: but if the dance is a thing of eternity, it is in
eternal perfection. And if it is in eternal perfection, it has no
points of time and place at which it will achieve perfection; it
will, therefore, have no concern about attaining to any such
points: it will, therefore, make no measurements of time or
place; it will have, therefore, no memory of time and place.
If the stars live a blessed life in their vision of the life
inherent in their souls, and if, by force of their souls'
tendency to become one, and by the light they cast from
themselves upon the entire heavens, they are like the strings of
a lyre which, being struck in tune, sing a melody in some natural
scale... if this is the way the heavens, as one, are moved, and
the component parts in their relation to the whole- the sidereal
system moving as one, and each part in its own way, to the same
purpose, though each, too, hold its own place- then our doctrine
is all the more surely established; the life of the heavenly
bodies is the more clearly an unbroken unity.
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